"I can't go back, because he is not there; and because—because you are there! You don't know,—you should never know, but I was disloyal to Warry from the first. I let him talk to me from day to day of you; I let him tell me that he loved you; I never let him know—I never meant any one to know—" He ceased speaking; she was very still and did not look at him. "It was base of me," he went on. "I would gladly have died for him if he had lived; but now that he is dead I can betray him. I hate myself worse than you can hate me. I know how I must wound and shock you—"
"Oh, no!" she moaned.
But he went on; he would spare himself nothing.
"It is hideous—it was cowardly of me to come here."
His hands were clenched and his face twitched with pain. "Oh, if he had lived! If he had lived!"
She rose now and looked at him with an infinite pity. This is one of God's unreckoned gifts to man,—the gift of pity that He has made the great secret of a woman's eyes. Evelyn's were gray now, like the stretch of sea beyond her, where a mist was creeping shoreward over the blue water.
"If he had lived," she said very softly, looking away through the sun-dappled aisles of the orchard, "if he had lived—it would have been the same, John."
But he did not understand. His name as she spoke it rang strange in his ears. The letter had fallen to the ground and lay in the grass between them; he half stooped to pick it up, not knowing what he did.
She walked away through the orchard path, which suddenly became to him a path of gold that stretched into paradise; and he sprang after her with a great fear in his heart lest some barrier might descend and shut her out forever.